<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Eric Frank Russell (January 6, 1905 - February 28, 1978) was a British science fiction writer who specialized in witty entertainments in which intelligent, plucky individuals triumph over stronger and more organized foes. He may have been the one who made up the supposed ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times."

Russell's first notable work, Sinister Barrier (1939), was based on Charles Fort's remark, "I think we are property." Russell served in the Royal Air Force during World War II, but found time to write the stories collected in the fix-up Men, Martians, and Machines (1955) As the title indicated, humans, aliens, and robots cooperate in these stories; the idea that external form or the living/mechanical distinction are unimportant to deciding whether an entity is conscious is a recurring theme in Russell's fiction.

Wasp (1957) was Russell's ultimate story of an individual bringing down a society. Its title comes from a news story about a major automobile accident caused by a wasp flying into a car window and annoying the driver. The Great Explosion (1962) was another fix-up, based on the idea of humanity settling all over the universe. Its conclusion, "And Then There Were None" (1951), is probably Russell's best-known work. It deals with an anarchistic society called the Gands (after Mohandas K. Gandhi) who run a society entirely on the basis of voluntary cooperation that proves an irresistible temptation to the regimented Earthmen who come to study it.

Russell was perhaps best at the shorter lengths. Some of his best-known works ("I Am Nothing," "Meeting at Kangshan"), can be seen as mimetic human-interest stories or Westerns with a thin coating of sf, but his best work, ("Metamorphosite," "Fast Falls the Eventide") also includes sfnal transcendence. Russell also wrote a nonfiction book, The Rabble Rousers, a sardonically witty look at such human follies as the Florida land boom and McCarthyism.

NESFA Press has published comprehensive collections of Russell's sf: Major Ingredients (short works) and Entities (novels).

External Links

• Review of Major Ingredients